Japan 2018

We are off on another trip to Japan. It’s still exciting but on this fifth trip it’s down to the traveller to make an effort to search out something new.

We have an early morning start. On the way to Heathrow I’m struck by our achievements: computers, cars, motorways, planes.



Approaching the airport the sky is full of comets. The pollution spewing from the cloacae of metal tubes, thrust into the sky with engines powerful enough to light a city, is converted into streaks of dazzling light by the rising sun.

Waiting to board I spy a woman flipping through the stamps in her passport reliving past adventures.



Masako grants me the window seat on our hop to Schiphol. I love looking down, deducing what must be the reality of an unexpected dorsal view. There are golf courses, train termini and the shimmering gold of points d’eau. Mountains of high-rise blocks appear like enchanted isles in seas of mist. Finally there are water courses snaking to the sea and wafer thin tongues of sand, empty now, no doubt, but places of summer dreams. Now all is grey cloud. Down on the rough sea another earth-bound comet is formed by the wake of a cruise liner. No cotton wool clouds but instead a shoal of oil tankers.

The tea and lemon cake on the flight are lovely. The only drawback is that an oaf plugged into his tablet is between me and a pee, I have to exercise majestic endurance.

Is anything more fun than holding back a yawn to build up the maximum pressure in your middle ears before relieving them all in one go?



Does no-one use the on-board loo on short flights? At Schiphol I actually had to queue in the gents, the guy in front of me was literally dancing from foot to foot.

I delight in all this. My mum only flew once, to Canada to visit the fecund scion of our family that moved there in my great-grandfather’s time. When my brother and I were small my dad took his first flight and bought back a 8mm film of the magic journey. The family was agog to see clouds massed into valleys and mountains, to see the wings of the airplane, to see the Atom symbol of the Brussels World Exhibition as the plane landed, what a marvel. It’s like it was yesterday. He brought back the trays that the in-flight food was served on. Ever since I have delighted in them, a meal in a kit, every boy’s dream. Army compo rations were like that when I was in the CCF. I long for a multi-tool!! Is it just time that gives this memory a golden glow?

On the 11hr flight to Osaka I’m in a sort of void between worlds where time both drags and rushes by. I drug myself on films. I stand up and queue for the toilet to relieve the aching in my legs.



Here we are in a Kobe, a high rise, modern port city, it’s all new as it was flattened within the last 20 years by an earthquake. We were taken out to dinner by the four ladies who run the tiny gallery where Masako is showing her jewellery. I asked Masako if some were volunteers as the gallery is clearly over staffed and was astonished to find that the four are sisters. When they greeted me today in the gallery and this evening at the restaurant they were like a group of excited sparrows’ bowing and twittering. They look very different but I have to accept that nature can shuffle the pack in different ways.



The husband in the room next to us, in our hotel in Kobe, grunts, it’s the sort of noise that an exotic ungulate in the Zoo might make. An ungulate is a cloven-hoofed mammal. A storyteller might imagine a nocturnal transfiguration, I must see if we can spot him outside his room but sometimes they can smell you coming from miles away and hide until the coast is clear.



The Takarazuka all women’s theatre is the cultural phenomenon of Kobe. It’s a 20th century invention. The audience is almost exclusively women. There may be a story here of emancipation or propriety or sexual orientation or of all three. There were no groups of salarymen or camp imitators in attendance. Things may be deduced from the presence of an official fan club and devotees. The eldest of the sparrows comes each month to enjoy the newest performance. In fact we met her on the train home with three lady “friends”. For £300 you can be professionally made up and photographed in a costume actually worn by one of the stars. The audience is quite subdued with only limited clapping. The usherettes creep crouching silently in the dark, guiding latecomers to their seats and reprimanding those whose thoughtlessness blocks the views of others. At a kabuki theatre the interview is a rushing flutter of bento boxes being opened but here the end of the performance is marked by an undignified stampede for the doors. The subsequent queues for the ladies are endless.



The Japanese artist Roisi donated all his life’s work to Kobe and they have shipped his studio to Rokko island and built a gallery around it. This is as lovely as his art however a whole room is dedicated to his war paintings. They aren’t heroic paeans to the Japanese warrior but are more or less simple war scenes. Nevertheless it’s always distressing to think of bloodshed, I learnt today that Japanese temples had to donate metal, i.e. sculptures, to be melted down for the waste that is war.



I have been experimenting with Google translate but beware if you are tempted by this new oil to communication between peoples, Masako just managed to stop me saying to her 104 year old granny, who was recently a passenger in a road accident, that I was sorry that she had “caused” an accident.

It works both ways in that Japanese businesses don’t spend enough on translation so you see some strange, entertaining, and enigmatic attempts. Proudly displayed on a shoulder bag was the chic slogan: ”Nothing really is Northless”. In Nara a handmade wooden sign, displaying a picture of what seemed to be a dead cat, said: “Catship Museum”. Kittens are very kawaii and there was a shop boasting that it dealt in “kitten goods”. In the Isuien garden tea house there was the odd injunction: “please do not enter the garden with shoes” and in the toilet a polite warning: “our staff also uses this restroom “.



Some of these very understandable scrambling of English read as enigmatic poems: “catch user emotion”, “Dead End a detour”, “Welcome but nothing specials”, “Behind the yellow line”, “Please do not eat and drink inside this area, but only water available”.

It’s funny how some people force themselves on your consciousness. We visited the famous Todaji temple this afternoon. Naturally there was the usual entertainment of giggling schoolgirls taking group selfies and having terrific fun. This is when I saw her first, in front of the temple, insisting on her boyfriend photographing her, frozen in a leap, emanating the famous Apple advert. I should say that she was fat. The second time was inside the temple. If you wriggle through the hole at the bottom of one of the pillars it will bring you health and long life. This is hilarious fun, the well-built guy in front of me failed as his hips were too broad. I then saw her emerging from the hole. I was impressed but Masako told me that she had just backed her legs into the space. The slim and patient boyfriend was again being instructed to take a photograph. Initially we thought this the beginning of an audacious lie. But, suppose that the last laugh is in her, that she is a comedian developing new material.

Back in Britain the owners of SUVs are all in a tizzy over plastic. Young Attenborough’s Blue Planet II” has woken everyone up to the damage that plastics in the ocean are having on marine life. No one can bear seeing albatross chicks being offered gullet fulls of plastic that their parents have collected during days spent at sea. Equally the International Committee on Climate Change seems, at long last, to be making it apparent to the public in general that eating meat is an ecocrime. Here in Japan finding veggie food for her chick remains a nightmare for Masako. As for plastic even a cup of coffee comes with a plastic wrapped hand wipe and the latest craze is for drip coffee, a sort of mini coffee filter that comes in an individual plastic wrapper and sits on top of your cup. It’s not even that the resulting drink is special! Ok what about the message that plastic is bad since Blue Planet has shown here. Well in order to spare Japanese sensibilities the 6 hours of Blue Planet was edited into two and I guess the eco stuff ended up on the cutting room floor.

We went to a very nice Indian resto last night. It runs from a number of wooden individual dining huts, each with two tables for a couple of guests. In the same yard are a number of bars and other eateries. It seemed like a quaint remnant of old Japan but is in fact a converted car park. So here’s the rub: you are in a tiny resto with another couple and, of course, they are friendly and excited ice cream vendors from Colorado. Now I’m always hopeless in such situations torn as I am between complete silence, as who wants others to judge you on the quality and nature of your conversation, and the desire to stage a little street theatre by inventing a wild existence for everyone’s entertainment.

Why don’t Europeans buy square cars, so practical and so beloved of Japanese. I would kill for such a quirky and practical vehicle but Suzuki won’t sell me one, in the UK.

Matsumoto Museum of Art had a Kusama exhibition where I skimmed a catalogue. She began as an exotic, sexually liberated Japanese émigré to the free love sixties America and has slowly transformed into a scowling fantasy creature laboriously scratching strange runes intended to magic up her enduring vision of peace and love. The cult of Kusama is widely practiced and tiny effigies of her can be found throughout the city.



Everyone likes to feel special. When we were in Kobe I felt special because Europeans simply don’t visit Kobe, instead they go to Nara which is swarming with them. The joke between Japanese is that only westerners follow the Nakasendō trail. This wasn’t entirely true as we got tangled with a group of ladies from Singapore. I simply pretend that these rivals to my exclusivity don’t exist, of course this doesn’t work as they sit next to you on the train. Like crazies on a London bus they glue themselves to you as if you are a sort of sulky flypaper.

Today had a nice picnic lunch in a park in Matsumoto. We then walked around the preserved High School which was quite nostalgic for Masako. Just as we were leaving she saw a notice announcing an exhibition of stones. This was put on by a stone collectors club. You will have guessed that the numbers were all men of a certain age. They were being enthusiastically corralled by a smart young woman who worked for the High School Museum which was hosting their exhibition. It turns out that these guys go on joint trips to various rivers where they search for the perfect stone. The stones evoke nature; some on long contemplation look like flocks of flying cranes, others reveal their inner dog, quite a number evoke mountains and some islands. The guys were absolutely hard core and in them I at last glimpsed the Japanese closeness to nature. The whole of creation is embodied in their stones. The stones are mounted in sand held in a ceramic dish which may in turn be supported by a small lacquered stand. Sometimes the stones need to be kept damp to fully reveal their colour and nature. Some club members carve their own bases to exactly fit their stone. They explained that you can have bases made but the craftsmen who do the work use expensive wood and such extravagance is beyond the pocket of most members. I took the photo of one ancient enthusiast who was very pleased with our interest in his stone. He instructed me in the best angle for the photograph and, on the suggestion of the museum employee, showed us the bottom. An absolutely charming experience. Of course back home in England these treasures would be nothing but stones.

We visited Osaka yesterday and went to the Castle where serendipity entertained us again. Walking through the overgrown plum orchard, on the outer ramparts, we suddenly had a paparazzi experience when we found thirty powerful telephoto lenses all trained on us. Actually they turned out to belong to a flock of twitchers and we were feet from the little brown job that they were photographing.

Today we had another stroke of luck as when emerging from the metro in Kyoto we found ourselves in the middle of an enormous procession. It was Kyoto’s annual historic pageant. It’s like a review of Japanese costumes through the ages. There were samurai included. Now I’m not fond of samurai as cutting up people in fancy outfits is still cutting up people. They were generally on horses and I must say they were very impressive. Apart from that there was much entertainment when people tried to dart across the crossing in front of the procession and were tackled by ever-vigilant police women. Then there were white faced women, it was all marvellous, like a Kurosawa film come to life in front of you. Coming home there was an extravagant sleeper on the train. A large schoolgirl she had a teddy bear mascot which was wearing a sleeping cap, very appropriate. First she lurched forward and then she lolled from side to side becoming unconsciously intimate with her neighbours who stoically ignored her advances. Are Japanese trains too comfy?



Are Japanese infant schoolchildren the cutest in the world? They were all over the Osaka Expo 70 park today. They swarm in groups and to distinguish their uniform cuteness the different groups all have their own distinctive coloured hat. So one group will have red caps and one yellow. Their guardians, not to be outdone, will often wear tops that are the same colour as the hats! I saw one delightful group all with little black bowler hats passing through a barrier and past a helpful garden attendant all chirping out “arigato go sai mas” in a cricket-like cacophony of thanks. You just want to squeeze them they are so delicious. When it rains they all produce plastic raincoats of different but vivid designs.

On the busy trains you get advice like “for the comfort of other passengers please hold your backpack in your hand” or “please be courteous in order to create a pleasant travelling environment” should there be gentle advice like this on FGW trains?

Today I travelled in the very first carriage of the train. There is a glass panel so that passengers can check that the driver is alive and well and also see the track in front. This a great vantage point. Actually whether the driver is alive or not probably wouldn’t matter as all he does between stations is press a single green button; a computer is driving the train. What a shame, I assume that this is the reason no small boy wants to be a train driver any more. A mum and child waved from a bridge perhaps his wife and baby reminding him that he has responsibilities and cannot quit to join the circus. Doing the same in the train to Yoyogi I found that a certain type of boy is always at the window, perhaps regretting the instability of the circus life.

The Hosomi museum has a show of prints and paintings on the theme of sex and monsters, a funny combination if you ask me.

Anyhow looking at the exaggerated sex of the Shunga prints I thought about Japan’s precipitous falling population and apparent lack of sexual activity among the young and even married couples. There are many reasons for this. Boys say that they feel inadequate, that’s the risk of pornography where all viewers must feel they don’t measure up. Then there is overwork, the housing crisis, the fear of family commitments and women wanting a career and to avoid a purely domestic future. Of course the Shunga prints were the pornography of their time yet their evident exaggeration makes them less threatening than Stormy Daniels. They seem to have been part of a culture where intercourse was a pleasure for both sexes. One interesting aspect of the Shunga prints is the emphasis on pubic hair something it seems is lacking in modern porn.

Anyhow the museum has made a reprint of a famous Shunga image and I had the rather surreal experience of being in a small screening room, surrounded by very proper Japanese ladies, whilst the carving and printing of the pubic hair was explained in meticulous detail. Indeed this was the entire content of the promo video for the prints.

I attended the Rose Life concert this afternoon put on by the residents. Rose life is the home where my mother-in-law stays. It started with a sing along with arm actions, great fun. I should say that the average age of the residents is 83. This was followed by a 90 year old magician. Very sweet but now I’m afraid that I know how the disappearing string of flags trick is done. They are stuffed into a dummy finger and then pulled out again. His act was pants but he was 90! At one stage he jumped off the stage to electrocute some of the volunteer staff. I feared his next trick would be to break his hip. After him were two old ladies playing the taishogoto. One had been tall but was now curled over like a question mark. They were supported from the audience by their teachers. For their last tune they were accompanied by a chap on a harmonica. This dude sported a sharp suit and a string tie. He then played his harmonica to accompany his wife’s singing. She had some discrete rhinestones on the back pocket of her trousers. She came up on stage in a wheelchair but sang standing supporting herself by holding a chair. After this was a lady doing Hawaiian dances, a flower behind her ear and a string around her neck. This takes some front when you are in your eighties but she pulled it off. Her moves were pretty fluent and I’m guessing her dancing would have looked very good once upon a time. Then there was a chap in a traditional outfit who told stories and then did a dance with a fan. My mother-in-law said that he never stopped talking so perhaps his act wasn’t story telling after all. His dance finished with him falling to his knees. The staff definitely thought he had collapsed. The finale was a series of Chopin duets. She played the piano whilst he did horrible things to a cello and exchanged cross words with her from time to time. I think that they even had a second go at one number that particularly disappointed him. All in all an unforgettable experience and a tribute to the human spirit, however if I had been the compare I would have finished with the sing song.